NSA employees spied on their spouses and lovers

The employees even had a code name for the practice – "LOVEINT" – meaning the gathering of intelligence on their partners.

The LOVEINT name is styled after the terms used for other types of intelligence gathering, like SIGINT (signals intelligence), GEOINT (geospatial intelligence), MASINT (measurement and signature intelligence), HUMINT (human intelligence), TECHINT (technical intelligence), etc.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that the NSA told the committee about “isolated cases” of employees spying on loved ones that have occurred about once a year over the past 10 years..

The spying was not within the US, and was carried out when one of the lovers was abroad.

One employee was disciplined for using the NSA's resources to track a former spouse, the Associated Press said.

Last week it was disclosed that the NSA had broken privacy rules on nearly 3,000 occasions over a one-year period.

Unfortunately, as The Washington Post notes, this problem isn’t limited to the NSA.

“There are plenty of cases in which local law enforcement officials have been accused of abusing their access to databases to acquire information about potential romantic interests,” the Post reported.

Officials who spoke to The Wall Street Journal claimed that the LOVINT violations only involved overseas communications and Feinstein made similar claims.

John DeLong, NSA chief compliance officer, said that those errors were mainly unintentional, but that there have been "a couple" of wilful violations in the past decade.

"When we make mistakes, we detect, we correct and we report," said Mr DeLong. (Does anyone believe his B/S? Where does it end?)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/24/loveint-when-nsa-officers-use-their-spying-power-on-love-interests/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10263880/NSA-employees-spied-on-their-lovers-using-eavesdropping-programme.html 

NSA spied on the U.N.:

Berlin - The German magazine Der Spiegel says the U.S. National Security Agency secretly monitored the U.N.'s internal video conferencing system by decrypting it last year.

The NSA broke the encryption in the summer of 2012 and within three weeks, had increased the number of decrypted communications from twelve to 458.

The agency on one occasion in 2011 also caught the Chinese secret services eavesdropping on the UN.

The documents show that after the European Union’s U.S. delegation moved into new offices in New York in September 2012, the NSA began eavesdropping on the organization’s headquarters in an operation codenamed “Apalachee.”

Quoting leaked NSA documents, the article said the decryption "dramatically increased the data from video phone conferences and the ability to decode the data traffic."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/25/nsa-un-der-spiegel_n_3813247.html

Declassified FISA court opinion shows NSA lied repeatedly to the court:

EFF finally gets to step away from one of its many legal battles with the government with its hands held aloft in victory and clutching a long-hidden FISA court opinion. 

For over a year, EFF has been fighting the government in federal court to force the public release of an 86-page opinion of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). Issued in October 2011, the secret court's opinion found that surveillance conducted by the NSA under the FISA Amendments Act was unconstitutional and violated "the spirit of" federal law.
 
Beyond the many instances of NSA malfeasance, the most damning aspect of the opinion is its lack of effect on future behavior. What does make it past the redaction details repeated wrongdoing that even the FISA Court, long perceived to be the NSA's rubber stamp, found egregious.

A footnote on page 16 points out that the agency had "substantially misrepresented" the extent of its "major collection program" (including the harvesting of "internet transactions") for the third time in less than three years. The same set of footnotes attacks the so-called "big business records" collection, accusing the agency of using a "flawed depiction" of how it used the data to basically fleece the FISA court since the program's inception in 2006.

Then there's this pair of concluding sentences, which severely undercut anyone's arguments that the FISA Court is a reliable form of oversight. 

Contrary to the government's repeated assurances, NSA has been repeatedly running queries of the metadata using querying terms that did not meet the standard for querying. The Court concluded that this requirement had been "so frequently and systemically violated that it can fairly be said that this critical element of the overall… regime has never functioned effectively." Other pages detail more concerns, including misrepresentation of the methods used in 702 collections, which the opinion claims "fundamentally alters the Court's understanding of the scope of the collection."
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130821/16331524274/declassified-fisa-court-opinion-shows-nsa-lied-repeatedly-to-court-as-well.shtml

German gov't warns people not to use Windows 8 - Microsoft created a backdoor for the NSA to spy on users:

According to leaked internal documents from the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) that Die Zeit obtained, IT experts figured out that Windows 8, the touch-screen enabled, super-duper, but sales-challenged Microsoft operating system is outright dangerous for data security. It allows Microsoft to control the computer remotely through a built-in backdoor. Keys to that backdoor are likely accessible to the NSA – and in an unintended ironic twist, perhaps even to the Chinese.

The backdoor is called “Trusted Computing,” developed and promoted by the Trusted Computing Group, founded a decade ago by the all-American tech companies AMD, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Wave Systems. Its core element is a chip, the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), and an operating system designed for it, such as Windows 8. Trusted Computing Group has developed the specifications of how the chip and operating systems work together.
 
Its purpose is Digital Rights Management and computer security. The system decides what software had been legally obtained and would be allowed to run on the computer, and what software, such as illegal copies or viruses and Trojans, should be disabled. The whole process would be governed by Windows, and through remote access, by Microsoft.

Now there is a new set of specifications out, creatively dubbed TPM 2.0. While TPM allowed users to opt in and out, TPM 2.0 is activated by default when the computer boots up. The user cannot turn it off. Microsoft decides what software can run on the computer, and the user cannot influence it in any way. Windows governs TPM 2.0. And what Microsoft does remotely is not visible to the user. In short, users of Windows 8 with TPM 2.0 surrender control over their machines the moment they turn it on for the first time.

It would be easy for Microsoft or chip manufacturers to pass the backdoor keys to the NSA and allow it to control those computers. NO, Microsoft would never do that, we protest. Alas, Microsoft, as we have learned from the constant flow of revelations, informs the US government of security holes in its products well before it issues fixes so that government agencies can take advantage of the holes and get what they’re looking for.
http://xrepublic.tv/node/5010 

NSA White Paper on bulk collection of telephony metadata:

This white paper explains the Government’s legal basis for an intelligence collection program under which the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) obtains court orders directing certain telecommunications service providers to produce telephony metadata in bulk. The bulk metadata is stored, queried and analyzed by the National Security Agency (NSA) for counterterrorism purposes.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (“the FISC” or “the Court”) authorizes this program under the “business records” provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), 50 U.S.C. § 1861, enacted as section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act (Section 215). The Court first authorized the program in 2006, and it has since been renewed thirty-four times under orders issued by fourteen different FISC judges. This paper explains why the telephony metadata collection program, subject to the restrictions imposed by the Court, is consistent with the Constitution and the standards set forth by Congress in Section 215. Because aspects of this program remain classified, there are limits to what can be said publicly about the facts underlying its legal authorization. This paper is an effort to provide as much information as possible to the public concerning the legal authority for this program, consistent with the need to protect national security, including intelligence sources and methods. While this paper summarizes the legal basis for the program, it is not intended to be an exhaustive analysis of the program or the legal arguments or authorities in support of it.

Under the telephony metadata collection program, telecommunications service providers, as required by court orders issued by the FISC, produce to the Government certain information about telephone calls, principally those made within the United States and between the United States and foreign countries. This information is limited to telephony metadata, which includes information about what telephone numbers were used to make and receive the calls, when the calls took place, and how long the calls lasted. Importantly, this information does not include any information about the content of those calls—the Government cannot, through this program, listen to or record any telephone conversations.

This telephony metadata is important to the Government because, by analyzing it, the Government can determine whether known or suspected terrorist operatives have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, including persons and activities within the United States. The program is carefully limited to this purpose: it is not lawful for anyone to query the bulk telephony metadata for any purpose other than counterterrorism, and Court-imposed rules strictly limit all such queries. The program includes internal oversight mechanisms to prevent misuse, as well as external reporting requirements to the FISC and Congress.

Multiple FISC judges have found that Section 215 authorizes the collection of telephony metadata in bulk. Section 215 permits the FBI to seek a court order directing a business or other entity to produce records or documents when there are reasonable grounds to believe that the information sought is relevant to an authorized investigation of international terrorism. Courts have held in the analogous contexts of civil discovery and criminal and administrative investigations that “relevance” is a broad standard that permits discovery of large volumes of data in circumstances where doing so is necessary to identify much smaller amounts of information within that data that directly bears on the matter being investigated. Although broad in scope, the telephony metadata collection program meets the “relevance” standard of Section 215 because there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that this category of data, when queried and analyzed consistent with the Court-approved standards, will produce information pertinent to FBI investigations of international terrorism, and because certain analytic tools used to accomplish this objective require the collection and storage of a large volume of telephony metadata.

 This does not mean that Section 215 authorizes the collection and storage of all types of information in bulk: the relevance of any particular data to investigations of international terrorism depends on all the facts and circumstances. For example, communications metadata is different from many other kinds of records because it is inter-connected and the connections between individual data points, which can be reliably identified only through analysis of a large volume of data, are particularly important to a broad range of investigations of international terrorism.

Moreover, information concerning the use of Section 215 to collect telephony metadata in bulk was made available to all Members of Congress, and Congress reauthorized Section 215 without change after this information was provided. It is significant to the legal analysis of the statute that Congress was on notice of this activity and of the source of its legal authority when the statute was reauthorized.
http://info.publicintelligence.net/DoJ-NSABulkCollection.pdf

NSA paid tech firms over Prism, says latest Snowden leak:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57599952-38/nsa-paid-tech-firms-over-prism-says-latest-snowden-leak/

NSA mad libs; Choose your own:
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/08/nsa-mad-libs-choose-your-own-redacted

NSA files: why the Guardian in London destroyed hard drives of leaked files:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/20/nsa-snowden-files-drives-destroyed-london

Lawmakers probe willful abuses of power by NSA analysts:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-23/nsa-analysts-intentionally-abused-spying-powers-multiple-times.html